The need to analyze, edit, and process digital multimedia content, for example, digital audio or digital video, has become a necessity for those who manipulate multimedia content. Processing and editing multimedia content, at one time, was thought of as a task only performed by professional studios. However, advances in computing hardware and the technology used for editing audio and video has opened the door to non-professionals as well.
For example, a home movie may be recorded using a personal camcorder and transferred to a personal computer for processing, editing, or long-term storage. Digital camcorders, for example, record audio, video, and other information related to the home movie in digital form, such as on tape, computer memory, or a mass storage medium. The home movie may then be transferred to a personal computer using any number of interfaces, and then stored as a digital stream such as multimedia file in a number of common formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, or DV, for example.
Due to algorithm complexity and the relatively large amounts of multimedia data that is typically edited and/or processed, the task of analyzing, processing, and editing multimedia content can take a considerable amount of time, even on powerful computers.
One example of processing of multimedia that may be performed is the conversion of a work of multimedia content from one format to another format. Typically, converting a work from one format to another involves a lot of analysis of the content included in the work.
This analysis is typically completed in a vacuum, without the consideration of prior processing or analysis that may have been performed on the multimedia bitstream. Thus, in a subsequent analysis of the multimedia bitstream, the multimedia bitstream is completely re-analyzed without consideration of the prior analysis. Additionally, if the multimedia bitstream is analyzed for other purposes, such as in preparation for temporally modifying the multimedia bitstream, the analysis is performed without regard to the prior analysis. This may be true even though the same type of analysis (e.g. motion detection, etc.) was performed previously when determining the commercial positions.
Additionally, if the multimedia bitstream is passed to another user or analyzed using different software, as is common, the information from any prior analysis is lost. Thus, any analysis of the multimedia bitstream already performed is repeated. This repeated reanalysis of the multimedia bitstream can be very time consuming and wasteful of computing and personnel resources.